Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged,” Donald Trump told voters in Ohio and Sean Hannity on Fox News. And that hit a nerve.
“Dangerous,” “toxic,” came the recoil from the media.
Trump is threatening to “delegitimize” the election results of 2016.
Well, if that is what Trump is trying to do, he has no small point.
For consider what 2016 promised and what it appears about to deliver.
This longest of election cycles has rightly been called the Year of the Outsider.
It was a year that saw a mighty surge of economic populism and
patriotism,
a year when a 74-year-old Socialist senator set primaries
ablaze with mammoth crowds that dwarfed those of Hillary Clinton.
It was the year that a non-politician, Donald Trump,
swept Republican primaries in an historic turnout, with his nearest
rival an ostracized maverick in his own Republican caucus, Senator Ted
Cruz.
More than a dozen Republican rivals, described as the strongest GOP
field since 1980, were sent packing. This was the year Americans rose up
to pull down the establishment in a peaceful storming of the American
Bastille.
But if it ends with a Clintonite restoration and a
ratification of the same old Beltway policies, would that not suggest
there is something fraudulent about American democracy, something rotten
in the state?
If 2016 taught us anything, it is that if the establishment’s
hegemony is imperiled, it will come together in ferocious solidarity —
for the preservation of their perks, privileges and power.
All the elements of that establishment — corporate, cultural,
political, media — are today issuing an ultimatum to Middle America:
Trump is unacceptable or so the message the network is sending to its minions everywhere.
Instructions are going out to Republican leaders that either they
dump Trump, or they will cease to be seen as morally fit partners in
power.
It testifies to the character of Republican elites that some are
seeking ways to carry out these instructions, though this would mean
invalidating and aborting the democratic process that produced Trump.
But what is a repudiated establishment doing issuing orders to anyone?
Why is it not Middle America issuing the demands, rather than the other way around?
Specifically, the Republican electorate should tell its
discredited and rejected ruling class: If we cannot get rid of you at
the ballot box, then tell us how, peacefully and democratically, we can
be rid of you?
You want Trump out? How do we get you out?
The Czechs had their Prague Spring. The Tunisians and Egyptians their Arab Spring. When do we have our American Spring?
The Brits had their “Brexit,” and declared independence of an
arrogant superstate in Brussels. How do we liberate ourselves from a
Beltway superstate that is more powerful and resistant to democratic
change?
Our CIA, NGOs and National Endowment for Democracy all beaver away
for “regime change” in faraway lands whose rulers displease us.
How do we effect “regime change” here at home?
Donald Trump’s success, despite the near-universal hostility of the
media, even much of the conservative media, was due in large part to the
public’s response to the issues he raised.
He called for sending illegal immigrants back home, for securing
America’s borders, for no amnesty. He called for an America First
foreign policy to keep us out of wars that have done little but bleed
and bankrupt us.
He called for an economic policy where the Americanism of the people
replaces the globalism of the transnational elites and their K Street
lobbyists and congressional water carriers.
He denounced NAFTA, and the trade deals and trade deficits with
China, and called for rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
By campaign’s end, he had won the argument on trade, as
Hillary Clinton was agreeing on TPP and confessing to second thoughts on
NAFTA.
But if TPP is revived at the insistence of the oligarchs
of Wall Street, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce —
backed by conscript editorial writers for newspapers that rely on ad
dollars — what do elections really mean anymore?
And if, as the polls show we might, we get Clinton — and
TPP, and amnesty, and endless migrations of Third World peoples who
consume more tax dollars than they generate, and who will soon swamp the
Republicans’ coalition — what was 2016 all about?
Would this really be what a majority of Americans voted for in this most exciting of presidential races?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” said John F. Kennedy.
The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of social revolution in
America, and President Nixon, by ending the draft and ending the Vietnam
war, presided over what one columnist called the “cooling of America.”
But if Hillary Clinton takes power, and continues America on
her present course, which a majority of Americans rejected in the
primaries, there is going to a bad moon rising.
And the new protesters in the streets will not be over-privileged children from Ivy League campuses.
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| The heart of stone shows in the face |
